Articles by Sara Cappelli

The Adulis Project started in 2011, directed by the Ce.RDO in collaboration with the Centre for GeoTechnologies of the University of Siena and the National Museum of Eritrea. The project aims to investigate and promote the cultural heritage of the ancient port site of Adulis, one of the most important archaeological sites in Eritrea and East Africa. The paper presents the results of the first two campaigns. First of all, we analyzed the satellite imagery to identify traces of buried archaeological elements. Then, three excavation areas were opened to unearth some of the structures already identified in the excavations of the last century, as well as to investigate the stratigraphy of the site in areas where archaeological excavations have never been conducted. In conclusion, a GPS survey was conducted on the whole area to elaborate a detailed map of the site, to create a DEM and to position all the archaeological structures that are visible on the surface. All the stratigraphic, topographic and cartographic data were managed in an open source GIS, based on the combination of the desktop mapping software Quantum GIS and the plugin pyArchInit.

The Adulis Project started in 2011, directed by the Ce.RDO in collaboration with the Centre for Geotechnologies of the University of Siena and the National Museum of Eritrea. The project aims to investigate and promote the cultural heritage of the ancient port site of Adulis, one of the most important archaeological sites in Eritrea and East Africa. The first two fieldwork seasons revealed a detailed stratigraphic sequence and massive walls, which required a complex documentation, highlighting the need for a system for managing data in a GIS platform, in which to collect all the stratigraphic, topographic and cartographic data. In the early stage, the project team used a commercial GIS software, ESRI ArcGIS, but with the progress of the work, the team soon realized that the application did not meet the required needs. In particular, the high licensing costs made it problematic to install and share data within the research team, especially for the Eritrean colleagues. It was therefore decided to seek an alternative solution adopting the open source plug-in pyArchInit, as it is a pre-prepared and already successfully tested software in several context and is perfectly in line with the needs which emerged during the work.